Truck wars: Ford, GM square off for pickup market supremacy

Ford Motor Co. has been losing ground in the pickup-truck market, a space it has long dominated. The company is painfully aware of it, and they’re doing something about it. So is the competition.

Ford’s
August sales data, released Wednesday, show exactly where the problem lies. While the F-series pickup continues to be both Ford’s best-selling vehicle and the best-selling vehicle in America, sales for the month fell 4.2% from a year ago to 68,109. Of Ford’s three main U.S. market segments – cars, utilities (SUVs) and trucks — only truck sales fell last month.

That could be about to change. Over the next two months Ford is retooling its Dearborn, Mich., assembly line so it can start cranking out its totally redesigned, aluminum-bodied F-150 pickup. If all goes as planned, they will roll into dealerships in November.

Using aluminum instead of steel body panels sheds about 700 pounds from the F-150. It will also jack up the sticker price and, most likely, the cost of repairs.

Ford knows the higher price tag (Edmunds.com shows them starting at about $25,420) poses a risk, but clearly thinks it’s a risk worth taking to maintain supremacy in the light-truck market.

“Ford is not going to back off that leadership crown,” Eric Lyman, a senior auto analyst at TrueCar told MarketWatch. Lyman said pickups have hit performance peaks in terms of horsepower and towing capacity, prompting an industry-wide shift in emphasis toward improved economics and practicality.

With that shift in mind, General Motors
is also launching two revamped pickups of its own this fall, the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon. In a press release Wednesday, GM crowed the Environmental Protection Agency has assigned its V-6, two-wheel-drive Colorado and Canyon rigs an estimated 26 miles per gallon on the highway, adding that’s “3 to 5 mpg better than competitors.” While it doesn’t name names, the message couldn’t be clearer: Fuel efficiency is going to be at the heart of its showdown with Ford.

Meanwhile, currently GM has all the momentum. Sales of its Chevrolet Silverado jumped 13% last month while GMC Sierra sales rose 10%, making it the best August for GM pickup sales since 2008. Hanging onto these gains in the truck segment is all the more important given GM’s overall 1.2% slide in August vehicle sales.

Lyman’s take on this? “The pickup wars are about to get really interesting.”

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